"Back to the Future," of course, is the English translation of the film's title, and the phrase may as well serve as the slogan of the Dina Mitrani Gallery's "Light in the Shadows" exhibition, greeting visitors as it does near the front entrance. The noirish photo, depicting a neon-bright cursive sign, "Chascomus," scattering light across the cobblestone road and the bus parked outside, is the first of many of the show's images to romanticize the past.

"I don't if it's the movie 'Cinema Paradiso' that does it to me," says Dina Mitrani, the exhibit's curator, "But the idea of going to the movies has changed. They're in humongous malls now, and it's a different experience from the small-town art houses. It evokes a lot more nostalgia and romance from some half-remembered past."

Small-town art houses, watering holes, ramshackle gas stations and other rural South American locales can be found in the black-and-white photography of Riverti, who lives and works in Uruguay. His images, captured between the 1980s and 2011, are paired with the stark North American imagery of William Maguire, a Miami-based professor of photography at Florida International University.

Mitrani, who met first met Maguire as a curator for FIU's art museum (now called the Frost), says he visits backwater regions of South Florida and the Midwest for inspiration, searching for light and shadows in the night. His "Boy on Bicycle in Front of Bar With Schlitz Neon Sign" shows a pre-teenager on a rusted bike parked outside a dive bar in Miami Beach, while 1979's "Homestead, FL" trains the camera on a stoic young woman leaning against a palm in front of her dirt-covered, split-level home.

Riverti's gelatin-silver prints match Maguire's appreciation for rural architecture, making landscapes out of Argentina's mist-filled ports ("Puerto de Olivos"), and a horse-racing track in Buenos Aires ("Hipodromo de San Isidro").

"What binds the two are this passion for architecture within the landscape," Mitrani says. "Maguire has these amazing examples of those years before the South Beach nightlife, in Haulover and Key Biscayne, this overwhelming feeling of youth. Riverti has these moody images that are atmospheric and film noirlike, and I think of a longing for the past, away from the hecticness of urban life."

Light in the Shadows: Photographs by William Maguire and Roberto Riverti